Elon Musk Says Grok 3.5 Thinks Like No AI Before—Is It Gonna Break the Internet?

Elon Musk is once again pushing the AI frontier with the upcoming beta release of Grok 3.5, promising something no chatbot has done before: reason from first principles and deliver answers that “simply don’t exist on the Internet.”

According to Musk, Grok 3.5 won’t just remix internet text like other models. Instead, it’s designed to think through problems, generating entirely new ideas by simulating human-style reasoning. In a post on X, he claimed Grok 3.5 could accurately answer complex questions about rocket engines or electrochemistry—domains where hallucination usually rules.

That’s a major shift from most AI models like ChatGPT or Gemini, which largely pull from and remix existing data. If Grok 3.5 actually delivers what Musk promises, it could reset expectations for what an AI can do—and leave competitors scrambling.

Grok Model Evolution

Grok’s rise isn’t just marketing hype—it’s backed by jaw-dropping growth.

When Grok 3 launched in February, xAI saw:

• +1000% increase in mobile downloads
• +260% growth in daily U.S. users
• A jump in web traffic from 189K to over 900K daily visits
• 4.5 million global hits per day, as the service expanded into Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia

That surge came before Grok 3.5’s promised leap in reasoning. Public hunger for a tool that can break free from traditional filters—and possibly deliver “unfiltered truth”—seems to be fueling this viral momentum.

Under the Hood

Powering Grok is Colossus, xAI’s Memphis-based supercomputer, now boasting over 200,000 GPUs and projected to scale to 1 million GPUs in coming years. This monster cluster enables Grok to operate with 10× more compute than previous state-of-the-art models.

Such scale isn’t just flexing—it’s needed to train Grok 3.5’s reasoning engine. That’s also likely why Musk is raising tens of billions of dollars to fund xAI’s continued expansion.

Meanwhile, other players like OpenAI and Google DeepMind are feeling the heat. If Musk’s massive compute gamble pays off, they’ll need to dramatically scale up—or risk being left behind.

Benchmarks

Before even hitting 3.5, Grok 3 (Think variant) has already outperformed GPT-4o and others in high-stakes academic tests. According to xAI’s benchmark post, Grok 3 Think achieved:

In Chatbot Arena, Grok reached an Elo rating of 1,402, beating even Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4. The model’s 1M-token context window also gives it a massive edge in handling long documents and multi-part reasoning.

These aren’t minor gains. Grok is building a rep for solving problems where others hallucinate—and 3.5 is expected to sharpen that edge.

First-Principles Reasoning

Most LLMs are pattern matchers. They reassemble information they’ve seen. Grok 3.5, Musk claims, is different—it tries to “understand” by breaking problems down to fundamentals.

This approach mirrors how real engineers or scientists think. Instead of asking “what’s the most likely answer?” Grok tries to ask “what would the answer have to be based on the principles at play?”

That distinction could be revolutionary:

• For science and engineering, it might generate genuinely new ideas or hypotheses.
• For startups, it could propose product ideas or algorithms that don’t yet exist.
• For education, it might teach reasoning skills—not just facts.

If xAI succeeds in tuning Grok 3.5 for first-principles inference, it could redefine the utility of LLMs—and push every major player to rearchitect their models.

So What’s Next—and Should You Care?

Grok 3.5 is rolling out next week in beta to SuperGrok subscribers only. That exclusivity is strategic—it builds hype and filters early feedback from the most invested users.

An API is also in the works, meaning developers could soon integrate Grok 3.5’s reasoning engine into their apps. Expect rapid experiments across coding, research, search, and beyond.

Meanwhile, rivals like Claude and Gemini are already racing to keep up in reasoning. With DeepSeek gaining traction too, we’re entering an era where problem-solving AI replaces mere chatbots.

Final thought: If Grok 3.5 truly thinks beyond its training data, it might not just change the game—it could redefine the rules of AI itself. Whether that’s thrilling or terrifying… depends on how we use it.